What I’ve been up to – Update for March 2014!

me

What I’ve been up to this past month: It was my birthday yaaaay!

 

Just to recap, this is what happened last month: Due to a 3 course Valentine’s dinner at a restaurant and several birthday celebrations I totally blew the diet (I actually ate desserts with “real sugar” in them, on more than one occasion, uh-oh!)

So on my birthday I naturally also ate cake and even had a glass of wine, as you do, haha…!

In between all of that I felt not so good and tried to undo the damage that I had done by indulging in all the sweet stuff.

 What I typically ate this month:

Breakfast:

  • ground brown rice pudding/ gluten free oatmeal porridge or gf free bread with my Healing Cabbage stir fry and cucumber (don’t crinkle your nose – it’s actually tasty!)

 Lunch & Dinner:

  • Broth, gluten free Rice/ Oatmeal bread with Prosciutto and 2 soft boiled eggs or sardines and cooked Savoy with butter and salt

 What I snacked on:

  • gluten free bread with flax oil and onion salt (too much bread, too many carbs…. I know, I know….)
  • Not to forget the German cheese cake on my birthday ;-)

Tons of sour cream, butter, Spelt flour, raisins, xylitol and coconut sugar went into it. I played with this recipe.

sugar-free-cheese-cake

cheese cake made with Stevia and Xylitol instead of sugar

How I felt:

  • Felt stressed and even overwhelmed at times (too much work – too little play).
  • I could deal with having to go through another round of Candida treatment (I’ve been there a hundred times).
  • But what I couldn’t deal with was the bloating (I looked 3 months pregnant, really painful too!)
  • and this dreaded sinus headache came back, I even had a temperature on two nights :(
  • not to mention the emotional dip I went through (How bad is it? – Is this a total relapse? – Will I have to start at square one again?… I was full of unsettling feelings of worry, guilt and fear).  Thankfully all the symptoms disappeared once I started taking the stronger probiotics twice a day (for comparison: last month I took these slightly less potent probiotics and only once a day).

 What supplements I took:

  • I’m still taking several things for healing leaky gut. Gelatin, L-glutamin – all very soothing to the tummy, but sadly also pricy.

  • Was rotating oil of oregano and olive leaf capsules for almost three weeks to get a handle on the new symptoms.

  • Back to taking the strongest probiotics I know (CP1 probiotics), twice per day. Other than that, the usual multi vit, Vit C, magnesium, chlorella, barley grass powder and Evening Primrose and Fish oil capsules.

  • Have started taking Swedish Bitters again after late meals in the evening and also massaging magnesium oil into my feet in the evening to help prevent muscle cramps which I have had a few nights recently – very effective.

To Recap What I learned and How that applies to you:

  • Stress is THE killer. You have to take time out to relax to put your body into healing mode.
  • For that you also need an alkaline environment in your body – so eat your dinner early (no salad and hard to digest vegetables after 6pm to prevent fermentation in your gut). And avoid deeply fried and very greasy food. Even tons of coconut oil and smoked oily fish are a no-no. Lightly grilled chicken with some veggies for instance is a good option.
  • Risking a relapse by drinking wine or eating cake with added sugar is totally not worth the excruciating healing reaction you have to go through afterwards. I can count the days when I enjoyed something outside the scope of the diet on one hand, yet I had to deal with the consequences for over two weeks! Nah, I’ve had enough!

Be wise – learn from my mistakes – stick with the diet until you’re 100% Candida symptom free and then some.

Don’t settle for maintenance level, having to watch what you eat all your life. Most Candida sufferers do. It doesn’t have to be you though.

Stick to the diet. Do it properly, and you’ll see amazing results. You can bet that I am going to be strict with my diet from now on – none of this halfheartedness.

You can do it :)

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If you’d like to read some of my other Candida Diet Updates to see how certain things affected my recovery then you can view them all at one glance here or just go to last month’s update where I shared some of my Valentine’s snaps with you ;-)

How you’re getting on with your diet at the mo? What works for you, what doesn’t? And if you’d like to receive my next candida diet update, health tips or recipes by email, then sign up for updates below.

{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

angela knight March 27, 2014 at 10:06

Thanks for all yrcinfo , it easy to get s little excited when yr body accepts new foods again. Do you think that us Candida sufferers will always need to take a maintenance dose of anti-fungals ? Had great results with colostrum lately, which might be useful info for someone x

Reply

Sandra March 27, 2014 at 11:44

No I don’t think that at all. I’ve had quite a few weeks in between my sugar feasts where I didn’t take any antifungals and was symptom free and absolutely fine. I truly believe had I continued to follow the diet and eaten more probiotic foods I would eventually have been able to eat and drink what I wanted without any repercussions. It was too early for me to relax the diet so substantially. Probiotics make a big difference too. Had I not been so adamant about taking virtually no probiotics to see whether I could wean myself off them, then my symptoms probably would not have reappeared when I did eat the sugary stuff. It was a combination of two months of non stop stress, eating too many carbs on a daily basis, having a few sugary meals and not taking probiotics to support my GI tract… I’m just relieved that I got it down to zero again fairly quickly. Initially during the diet it felt like no matter what I did I couldn’t get rid off the symptoms and that was so demoralizing.

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angela knight March 27, 2014 at 13:52

Candida is emotionally challenging, FACT ! You done well to turn it around.
Thanks for info, I can be virtually symptom free apart from a white tongue in the morning. This journey is almost a year long and its a diet not for the faint hearted for sure

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Kathy March 27, 2014 at 20:43

Sandra you did the same thing I did and I still am having a hard time getting back to where I was before. The sweets did me in for sure. I have been feeling so bad again. But I learned something from you I also cut back on the probiotics so now I’ll up them like you did and pray it works for me.

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Sandra March 31, 2014 at 12:05

Kathy you’ll be back on track in no time. It’s so nice to hear from you. Don’t be disheartened (it happens to the best of us ;-) It will be much quicker to feel well again than last time. Hope you’re already feeling better. You can do it! No more sweets (I gave the rest of mine away yesterday and froze my cake…) Take care x

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cat March 28, 2014 at 21:18

Gosh – I was going to say how yummy the German cheesecake looks and sounds, but probably shouldn’t even think about it right now. I’ll save the recipe for another time, though. :-) And I’m eager to try the waffles/pancakes! I had no idea salads shouldn’t be for dinner, so thank you for that advice! We’ve been having them mostly for lunch, anyway… but then I don’t usually feel hungry for dinner. Last night I just had another smoothie. But I’ve started varying my smoothies lately. Can you believe for the past two years I pretty much, almost every morning, had the same old blueberry smoothie that I’ve been drinking since finding out I had intestinal candida? But I still take morning & evening probiotics, as well as digestive enzymes with meals. However, I’m having a hard time wanting to eat much of anything once I get through breakfast and lunch, so really need to figure out a menu plan that I can stick to during the week. Plus, a way that I can include things like almond meal pancakes so that I feel like I’m having a carb without really having a carb. Oh – and thank you for the magnesium oil suggestion for leg cramps! Are leg cramps a side effect of all this? Does anyone besides me get tired of thinking about food all the time?

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Sandra April 5, 2014 at 18:46

I think it’s brilliant that you’ve been having the same smoothie every day. You know why? Because it makes me want to try it (haven’t had a smoothie practically since last summer when I had the relapse…. but that had to do with the date mousse and chocolate ice creams I had, would have probably been ok if I had stuck with just the smoothies ;-) Hang on, I had one fruit smoothie: Carrot apple celery ginger – killer combo, you got to try it!

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  Carla March 31, 2014 at 11:51

How do you know if you are free of yeast overgrowth?

Reply

Sandra March 31, 2014 at 12:01

You know that you’re free of yeast overgrowth when you don’t have any Candida symptoms any more when taking antifungal supplements. You can test urine, blood and stool for yeast overgrowth. But you can easily tell yourself, if you haven’t got any yeast infections anymore and feel fully well again.

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